fir-clad summit of Cithaeron.  Upon the plain, at the distance of three or four miles from the sea, are several small rocky hills of picturesque appearance, isolated and seemingly independent, but really parts of a low range parallel to Hymettus.  Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the Acropolis, and upon the group of lesser heights around and in the valleys between clustered the dwellings of ancient Athens.

[Illustration:  VIEW OF THE ACROPOLIS AND THE COLUMNS OF THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER OLYMPUS.]

It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly sensitive to beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the world in matters of taste, especially in the important department of the Fine Arts.  Nowhere are there more charming contrasts of mountain, sea and plain—­nowhere a more perfect harmony of picturesque effect.  The sea is not a dreary waste of waters without bounds, but a smiling gulf mirroring its mountain-walls and winding about embosomed isles, yet ever broadening as it recedes, and suggesting the mighty flood beyond from which it springs.  The plain is not an illimitable expanse over which the weary eye ranges in vain in quest of some resting-place, but is so small as to be embraced in its whole contour in a single view, while its separate features—­the broad, dense belt of olives which marks the bed of its principal stream, the ancient Cephissus, the vineyards, the grain-fields and the sunny hillside pastures—­are made to produce their full impression.  The mountains are not near enough to be obtrusive, much less oppressive; neither are they so distant as to be indistinct or to seem insignificant.  Seen through the clear air, their naked summits are so sharply defined and so individual in appearance as to seem almost like sculptured forms chiseled out of the hard rock.

The city which rose upon this favored spot was worthy of its surroundings.  The home of a free and enterprising race endowed with rare gifts of intellect and sensibility, and ever on the alert for improvement, it became the nurse of letters and of arts, while the luxury begotten of prosperity awakened a taste for adornment, and the wealth acquired by an extended commerce furnished the means of gratifying it.  The age of Pericles was the period of the highest national development.  At that time were reared the celebrated structures in honor of the virgin-goddess who was the patron of Athens—­the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheum—­which crowned the Acropolis, and were the glory of the city as they were the masterpieces of Grecian architecture.  During the preceding half century many works of utility and of splendor had been constructed, and the city now became renowned not only in Greece, but throughout the ancient world, for the magnificence of its public buildings.  Thucydides, writing about this time, says that should Athens be destroyed, posterity would infer from its